Elizabeth Edwards: Attacker-in-chief

Elizabeth Edwards has emerged as the attacker-in-chief for her husband’s presidential campaign, and it is a job to which she is well-suited.

I do not say this because I think she is a mean person -- she is not -- but because she so completely believes that her husband would make the best president that she feels free to characterize his Democratic opponents as visionless and power-hungry.

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And those who are attacked by Elizabeth Edwards don’t really want to attack her back. What would be the point?

She gets great press, she is bravely battling cancer while keeping up an exhausting campaign schedule and, besides, she is not running for anything.

Which allows her to lash out without getting lashed back. And she has used that power effectively.

In July, Elizabeth Edwards attacked Hillary Clinton for not speaking out enough on behalf of women.

“She’s just not as vocal a women’s advocate as I want to see,” Edwards told Salon magazine. “John is.”

Then came an Elizabeth Edwards interview with blogger Ed Cone early this month, which was more explosive.

“‘In some ways, it’s the way we have to go,’ Edwards said. ‘We can't make John black; we can't make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars.’”

As Marc Ambinder pointed out in his blog, Elizabeth Edwards seemed to say that a “rich white guy in the South is oppressed by his race or gender.”

But the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign did not lash back.

Now, Elizabeth Edwards has given a long interview to The Progressive magazine in which she mulls the inadequacies of the rest of the field.

“The problem for me with the other candidates is I don’t know what it is that drives them,” Edwards says.

She goes on: “What do you hear these other people saying [about poverty]? Not one word. It’s fine to go give a speech on inequity. But I don’t for a minute think it’s what drives these other candidates. I don’t.”

Not only do they lack core beliefs, but they are also gutless plagiarists.

“Sometimes it seems we have these beliefs but it turns out it’s like a Hollywood set: It’s all facade and there’s no guts behind it,” Elizabeth Edwards says. “You listen to the language of what people say, particularly Obama, who seems to be using a lot of John’s 2004 language, which is maybe not surprising, since one of his speechwriters was one of our speechwriters, his media guy was our media guy.”

OK, so that is what the attacker-in-chief is supposed to do, right?

Right. Which is why it is so interesting that when it comes to the war in Iraq, Elizabeth Edwards lets Hillary Clinton off the hook.

Though John Edwards has said his vote to authorize the war in Iraq was a mistake for which he apologizes, Hillary Clinton has consistently refused to do either.

But in her Progressive interview, Elizabeth Edwards says: “Now Hillary, I don’t know what Hillary’s objection is. She, even in the New Hampshire debate, said, ‘I made a mistake.’ People are looking for a mea culpa from her.”